Stories

New Relic recently released Real User Monitoring which allows you to measure your page load time (and much more) across browsers, operating systems, and geography for users across the globe. If you want to see how fast your page is loading client side, New Relic can now help with that as well.
from real users, across the globe. How fast is your web app for your users?

If the command-line frightens you, Github just released the tool for you! It can manage your local and remote git repos, allowing you to branch, merge, commit, push, pull, and all that other stuff git users talk about.

Dilbert's pointy-haired boss once commanded that they "can't use any tools that haven't reached 1.0", so Tina (Dilbert's technical writer) can now rejoice - Cucumber has reached 1.0 status- she can now help write acceptance tests for their software! Wally was also happy to see rake move ever-closer to 1.0 status in the past few months...

Do you with you were a better chef? Do you have a fetish for puppets? Do you manage servers that are older than dirt and fear the day you have to rebuild one at 3:30 in the morning? Check out blueprint - it can scan a debian or red hat-based linux server and build puppet or chef scripts to rebuild the state of package installs, config file changes, and even source code installs.

The modernizr javascript library lets you inspect a browsers capability with javascript and progressively enhance your application with what you learn. This gem packages it up so that it works with the rails asset pipeline so that it is a versioned resource as opposed to "some javascript you copied into place".

Nordea is a gem that talks to a Nordea bank web service to get exchange rate information that is updated about 3 times a day. If you are working with the Money gem, it integrates nicely, so that your currency amounts have real currency units associated with them.

speaking of units, have you ever wished your variables had unit information with them, so you could add centimeters to inches and get back feet? Or divide that by seconds and get miles-per-hour? Check out ruby-units.

A shoutout to the Frozen Rails conference organizers for giving a discount to rails committers! If you've ever given a patch to rails, you get 10% off. If you have made 50 commits, its free! Now if they only had a program to give out free press passes...